


moods, states of grace, & elegies

by thehandsingsweapon



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate History, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Minor Character Death, Murder, Switching, catholic / orthodox homophobia, japanese expansionism started hundreds of years earlier, mention of suicide, playing a little fast and loose with history, the silk road, uchronic au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2019-05-06 02:24:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14632119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: "Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”Victor Nikiforov has traveled far and wide in the company of trader Christophe Giacometti on the silk roads to arrive at Hasetsu, capital of the Great Nihon Empire. He expects to stay a winter, until the seasons change again, and fairer weather and the changing of seasons can return him to his wanderlust.He does not expect to fall in love with the Crown Prince.[ alternative history / deliberately uchronic / created for yoiroyaltyweek ]





	1. 1 / the little that is his;

**Author's Note:**

> Listen, fam: this exists because I have two loves: 1) the book _Invisible Cities,_ by Italo Calvino 2) the first season of the show _Marco Polo_ which is ridiculous and such a guilty pleasure. Imagine an alternative history whereby instead of embarking down the path of the Shogunate, and Sakoku, Japan instead becomes expansionist centuries earlier, resulting in an empire "on which the sun never sets." If you've read _Invisible Cities_ then you will be familiar with the fact that it's fantastical and vague, and its cities are fictional and sometimes reference modern or anachronistic objects; I haven't extended those anachronisms quite so far, but objects and eras are mixed here deliberately as a nod towards the book.

 

 _Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes_ **_the little that is his,_ ** _discovering the much he has not had and will never have._

\- Italo Calvino, _Invisible Cities_

 

**\- - -**

 

He has traveled many thousands of miles, and with every step more places fall into the distant reaches of dreams and memory. Maurilia, Zirma, Trude, and Despina are now all names relegated to Victor Nikiforov’s past. These words demarcate sections of a journal he keeps, filled with notes and sketches of each of the cities he has passed through and left behind; yet somehow none of them capture the bright, saturated places that live on in his memories. He has not managed to capture the way sunlight streams in through the flap of a yurt, out on the steppes, or the smell of spices, or the strange traditions of the tribes that roam the empty wilderness. The journal is his Sisyphean task: by attempting to capture the essence of these places on paper, Victor has already lost them.

Hasetsu is the name of his present, though tonight he does not have the heart to draw. Tonight, the city is lively and bright: the Emperor has ordered a feast, and everywhere Victor turns a symphony of sounds, smells, and colors is orchestrated for his senses. The best wine has been poured. The incense and the lanterns are lit. Tonight, even the leaders of their caravan dine at the banquet table: Victor, of course, and his friend, Christophe, a Swiss-Italian merchant who has traveled the silk roads so often that he is nearly as bronzed as the locals. They are accompanied by a priest named Crispino, whom Victor only pretends to tolerate; Christophe is an incurable gossip and has told Victor rumors: that Michele has a beautiful sister, and that he only entered the clergy to have the leverage to force her into a cloister, where no man might ever touch her. Victor thinks hypocrisy is likely the least of his sins, and yet here he is: evangelizing.

Around them swells music and dancing, both things that Victor loves, and Christophe has long since left him to get lost among the throng of revelers. It leaves Victor with Michele, who watches the festivities with a steady, serious expression. Victor can’t help but accept a refill of his wine when he tries to guess at the priest's thoughts. There must be much here that he considers sin, whether it be the painted ladies who pour drinks, their collars low, or the fact that Christophe has already told them that many of the nobility intend to sneak the Prince off to one of the tea houses later, so that he may properly learn how to please his soon-to-be wife, and that Christophe intends to accompany them.

For weeks now, Victor has been plagued by the same recurring dream: he stands alone in the hot springs hidden within the gardens of the Hasetsu palace complex while it softly snows. Inevitably, the steam gathers, twists itself into an all-too-familiar shape. In Victor’s dreams, long black hair cascades over his fingers like ink and soft silk. In Victor’s dreams, Prince Yuuri smiles his demure smile, and presses his lips to the corner of Victor’s mouth.

In Victor’s dreams, they are lovers.

He has known, all along, that to travel is to learn that there is nothing on earth that ever belonged to men in the first place, nothing he can rightfully say is his own. He is perfectly accustomed to keeping his innermost desires a secret, to navigating the world behind the smokescreen of a charming smile. And though Victor, too, is a noble of a sort, and understands how the world works, had known to anticipate a day was coming where an announcement like this might be made: an engagement, an upcoming wedding — somehow he had not emotionally assented to the facts. Now, reality rips through his dreams like a katana through silk, and as Prince Yuuri offers his arm to the lady who’s to be his bride, Victor thinks to himself _she’s not pretty enough for him,_ and takes another sip of sake _._

The evening’s tortures continue well past dark, though even Victor can tell the official festivities are beginning to wind down. Christophe has returned, properly intoxicated, robes already mussed. “We’re leaving soon,” he purrs, ignoring Crispino's displeased huff. “Are you coming?”

Victor is perilously close to being drunk, has run out of sake, and has no patience left to sit within the aura of Michele’s self-righteousness. There is nothing in the pleasure houses that he actually wants, and there never has been, but perhaps somehow he can lose himself there for a while. Perhaps there, he will exorcise the shadow of his dreams, rid himself of the damnable longing that has lodged itself into his ribcage like a thorn. He certainly will not be asking the priest for help; he can only imagine how much worse Michele’s disapproval might be if he knew the truth. Victor Nikiforov is the second son of a Boyar, but he has never so perfectly understood himself as he did the first time he was brought to the hot springs, and told to disrobe, and made to sit almost within arms reach of the Prince. The God Michele worships seems to have no love of his own creation when they feel the way Victor does: Victor who doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the flex of sinew in Yuuri’s arms or the heat-induced flush on his face, veiled by the steam.

He will remember the way Yuuri rips through him like a sandstorm, long after his circumstances force him to leave this place.

Of course, when he stands, Victor realizes he’s properly drunk: the streets tilt and the buildings blur together and the tea house itself is a maze of curtains and sliding shoji doors that Victor knows he could not navigate without Christophe ahead of him. Christophe pulls him along like a kite on a string, and when he comes to an abrupt stop in front of one of many doors, Victor crashes into his back. Perhaps this is why Christophe takes a moment to adjust Victor’s clothes, why Christophe fixes him with a piercing, hazel gaze. “I want you to understand that we will never speak of this again,” he says. Christophe is a clever man, and under normal circumstances Victor enjoys trying to match wits with him. For one bewildering moment, he is outmatched, trying to solve an equation in which he does not have all the variables. He is not given the opportunity to puzzle it out: Christophe slides the door open, pushes Victor through it, and pulls it shut behind him.

This is a room built for one purpose, but it must be the nicest of them, strung up with silks and filled with a heady smell from the incense burning in one corner. None of this captures Victor’s attention. He is stuck on the singular impossibility kneeling in front of the bed: Prince Yuuri, whose hands bunch briefly into his robes before he rises with the same grace Victor has dreamt of, in visions where he emerges out of the mist. Victor’s thoughts fall down the stairs of the paradox time and time again: that there must be an accident, because Yuuri cannot possibly be here for him, and that there cannot possibly be one, because the royal family do not make mistakes.

“This is a dream,” says Victor, clumsily. He has been called a prodigy before, but his aptitude for languages is failing him now. He has never been so embarrassed of his accent.

“You have dreamt of this?” Yuuri inquires, eyes dark in the dim light. The lanterns do much for the sweet flush on his cheeks. To be a foreigner, as Victor is, who looks at Yuuri and wants what he wants, is to wish for death. To lie to the throne is to do the same.

Victor closes his eyes, balanced on a blade’s edge of damnation, and tries not to think about what happens to men who tempt fate. “Yes.”

“Tell me,” says Yuuri, who will rule an empire so large it is incomprehensible someday, and who is not really asking. Princes do not have to ask. He is much too close now, and his open palm rests against Victor’s cheek. Victor knows, _logically,_ that it is only humanly warm, but he feels the soft weight of Yuuri’s caress like the heat of a brand.

“In the hot springs,” Victor admits, counting the rise and fall of his own breath. He is a polyglot, and he’d thought, up until now, that he had been progressing well in his studies of the local language. He has described for Yuuri, at length, the cities of his empire as they take tea together in the courtyard of the palace, and yet now now he cannot manage to put his desire into words. “You walk … you walk … from the steam.”

Yuuri’s eyes flash in the dark; his mouth curls, just-so. Victor wavers on his feet, only barely resisting the impulse to surge forward and drink in his smile. “What happens next?”

“You.” He pauses, curses the inadequacies of language. Victor has not yet learned the word for _kiss,_  has never imagined that there might be a scenario where he'd need to use it _._ “You …” Helpless, he can only tap his own mouth, and plead. _“Here.”_

Yuuri kisses him. The brush of his lips is as soft as Victor’s imagined, but not nearly as delicate: Yuuri’s fingers fist in his tunic, and he teases Victor’s mouth open. Victor chases the taste of ripe plums and liquor until they’re both panting. “The word for that,” Yuuri murmurs, at first against his jaw, and then against Victor’s throat, “is _seppun._ ”

Language lessons. He has spent hours in Yuuri’s presence, practicing, learning to write, having his pronunciation meticulously critiqued. The reference to those moments punches an incredulous laugh out of Victor’s body; the feeling that accompanies it is shaky, like something trying to find its legs or its wings. He reaches with trembling fingers for Yuuri’s high ponytail, finds the cord of hair holding it in place, and pulls. _“Beautiful,”_ Victor whispers, in his own language, which earns him a quizzical look. He has no rights to make demands of Yuuri, he knows, just as he has no right to want him, but it is not enough to stop him. “Teach me more.”

Yuuri’s smile is slow and sweet, and Victor promises himself he’ll savor it for the rest of his days, along with whatever else comes this inexplicable, improbable, impossible night. He takes a step back and does not give Victor the chance to protest his loss: he squares his shoulders, every inch a prince, and looks at Victor with heady expectation and liquid, languid heat.

The next word is a command, accompanied by a gesture to clarify its meaning, and Victor will not disobey.

_“Disrobe.”_

Victor draws his tunic over his head, discards it, unbuckles his boots, which are soft and worn-down with travel. “You cannot possibly want me,” he murmurs, almost to himself, trying and failing to shake off a haze of his disbelief. He does not think of the simple, sweet-faced girl Yuuri is set to marry; in the morning he will not even be able to summon a phantom of guilt.

Yuuri’s eyes never leave him. He waits until Victor is naked and vulnerable to tilt his head and smile. For just a moment his bonfire gaze is tempered into hearth-warmth and fondness, but the flickers of such softness are brief and fickle as the flames Victor always thinks of. He returns to their lesson with the impish curl of a smirk. “Lie down,” he instructs, undoing the ties of his own robes, leaving the silk to part and pool over his shoulders. His fingers drift over Victor’s shoulders, his sides, his hips; he draws Victor’s legs around his waist and leans forward. The silk of his hitatare makes a curtain around them both; the ink of his hair a waterfall. “I have wanted you,” Yuuri corrects, between kisses and touches that leave Victor gasping and hungry, “from the moment I saw you.”

Delirious and drunk, Victor, who has been everywhere, cannot help but think that this is the only place he actually wants to live. And if Yuuri were to open his chest, somehow, to build a palace of his own inside of Victor’s ribcage, if —


	2. 2 / transparent as a dragonfly;

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "guinevere comes to lancelot."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mind the rating change and the tags update;

_ Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline,  _ **_transparent as a dragonfly._ **

\- Italo Calvino,  _ Invisible Cities _

 

**\- - -**

 

It is late, and the palace is quiet, and Yuuri ought to be asleep. There’s no excuse for it, except for the sound of Victor Nikiforov’s voice, still lingering in his memories. Even that should not be troubling Yuuri’s thoughts the way it does tonight: Victor has spent countless days in the imperial gardens at the Emperor’s request, regaling Toshiya and Yuuri with tales from his travels. Today he spoke at length of the last port he stayed in before a ship bore him to Nagasaki: a place only a few stops on his journey from Hasetsu itself, or from the tea house Yuuri cannot stop thinking of no matter how hard he tries. All of these stories are the ripple of a pond, working its way inwards to the place where the stone has fallen: to that first kiss, perhaps, or even earlier: to the first time their eyes met. 

More than once, Yuuri has caught himself touching the fading bruise on his collarbone, the place where the stain of Victor’s mouth will eventually wash off like a watercolor. He’s promised himself that one night will be enough, swore to commit every detail to memory: the hunger of Victor’s kiss, the pull of his hands in Yuuri’s hair, the way he’d opened for Yuuri so beautifully, and come with Yuuri’s name — Yuuri’s  _ personal _ name, unattached to his title, a shocking intimacy in and of itself — on his tongue. It has been just three days, and already Yuuri is dissatisfied with his recollection. He cannot remember whether or not Victor’s real smile, subtler than the one he wears in court when he intends to charm, is higher on the right or left side of his mouth. He is not sure whether or not he licked a bead of sweat out of the hollow of Victor’s throat before or after he’d poured oil on his fingers and slid into Victor’s body. 

He is not sure how many treacherous things either of them whispered in the dark, separated by their native languages and yet united in intuition. There are times when Yuuri does not think he requires words to understand Victor, and yet there are others when he is just as certain that he will never, ever know him well enough to feel satisfied. All he knows for sure is that if and when he finally gives into this feverish restlessness, and reaches for his cock, which he’s done before when he’s alone in the dark like this, and free to do as he pleases, the act of pretending — of merely imagining Victor — will be only a pale echo of the original thing. 

Yuuri has fashioned himself into a liar: he will never be satisfied with just the one taste.

There is also the matter of the fading mark to contend with. Yuuri wants another one. 

What he would really like, more than anything else, is the freedom to be just a man to Victor, instead of a demigod set upon the world’s most restrictive pedestal. He’d distracted himself in the garden by considering their roles reversed until it had proved too dangerous a thought to follow, but here Yuuri lets his imagination take over, lets himself be swept away into a different world; one where Victor is the god, and Yuuri the mortal. He imagines what it might have been like, to be underneath Victor’s body that night, to wrap his legs around Victor’s waist and take him in, until he can no longer tolerate simply imagining it, and has to reach for the seaweed oil he took with him when he took his leave of the tea house.

Attempting to find out provides no reprieve. He does not discover in his own body the place he found in Victor’s. 

Restless, dissatisfied, he slips out of his room into the waiting dark. There is always a guard stationed there, and tonight it is Takeshi no Nishigori, a good man who is already party to Yuuri’s biggest secrets. That this is insignificant by comparison is a laughable paradox; what he does in the dark of night today doesn’t matter nearly so much as what he’ll never do, in the dark of night tomorrow. Yet already he thinks of Victor in the inverse, as though his entire body is built to sing just the one name. 

Giving himself over to those chords is dangerous; there will come a day when he cannot go where Victor is meant to, and any fantasies of running away with him, out into the wilderness of the empire, are just that: fantasies.

“My lord?”

“See to your lady, Nishigori. I’ll be back in the morning.” 

Yuuri plots his course through the gardens to the guest quarters. Which room Victor occupies is an insignificant detail, a trifle to a Crown Prince. Naturally, Yuuri knows it’s the third one on the right, and he lets himself in and then closes the door. Victor is asleep, his journal still on the mattress, and Yuuri sees his own face sketched into its open pages. Victor makes him appear much more beautiful than he really is; out of deference for that fact, Yuuri is gentle when he sets the book aside on top of the trunk that contains most of Victor’s possessions. His explorer is curled onto his side, arms loosely wrapped around the blankets. Yuuri smiles: he sees the ghost of himself in those twisted sheets, held close in the back room of a brothel until nearly dawn. Carefully, Yuuri climbs into bed, and tries to unwind Victor onto his back, telling himself that he will live with simply being close until his thoughts settle. That these movements are enough to rouse Victor from sleep is not something he can manage to summon any guilt for. “Yuuri,” Victor breathes, as disbelieving as he was the first time. “What are you …”

“I wanted to see you,” Yuuri murmurs, embarrassed by his own neediness now that someone else — even the singular object of all his desire — has witnessed it. He takes some comfort in the fact that Victor’s already reaching for him; cupping his cheek and letting one hand traverse, again, the ridges of Yuuri’s spine. 

It’s a simple, sparse admission, and yet it pleases Victor, somehow. Yuuri has seen similar expressions on the faces of men who have come to court to argue their case and left with the judgment they wanted, but there is no avarice in Victor’s eyes, no ambition. There are no strings attached to his delight. “Did you?”

“Mm.” Yuuri cannot help himself; he angles for a kiss. “It’s your fault,” he says. What he means is something like:  _ you walked into the palace one day and decided I would love you,  _ but Yuuri cannot say that. Instead he lists the things that keep him awake at night: “… in the garden, telling stories …”

“Then I will tell you about a thousand different cities,” Victor swears against his mouth.  _ Ten thousand,  _ Yuuri thinks, and he unties his yukata, climbs under the covers. He drinks in the way Victor’s eyes widen when he fumbles under Victor’s sleeping robes, finds the length of him still soft, and strokes with a palm that is still slick with oil. 

Yuuri lines up their bodies —

“Yuuri, you can’t —“

Yuuri hums. He is the Crown Prince, and nobody tells him what to do, not even Victor. “I prepared,” he whispers into the shell of Victor’s ear, leaning back to drink in his look of complete and utter surprise. Yuuri can only understand the answering curse he receives, in Victor’s own tongue, by instinct and impulse, though he’s desperate for a translation. He himself does not have the words for this sensation as he guides Victor inside of him: the strange push of it, almost uncomfortable despite how slicked and stretched he is. In spite of this, somehow Yuuri knows that there is no part of Victor that will ever do him harm. Yuuri sinks further down and feels both the first bright sparks of his own pleasure and the way Victor quickens inside of him. The beginnings of an understanding start to take root: he thinks soon he will comprehend what it was that could make Victor throw back his head and moan, the way he had, that night. 

This is what he has thought of all day, this and nothing else — 

“Do you know that I will never be of use to anyone,” Yuuri asks, steadying his hands on Victor’s broad chest, bunching the sleeping shirt into his fists. There are dozens of men in this palace who do his bidding, who see to every possible detail, but Yuuri attends to nothing, and no one. “No one,” he says, delirious with the absolute freedom of this one, forbidden thing, “no one but you. Like this.”

Victor experiments with a shift of his hips; Yuuri’s lashes flutter. “Is that what you want?” He echoes. His blue eyes are very wide, and very dark, and Yuuri barely resists a shudder. He paws at Victor’s shirt, uselessly, wants it gone, wants there to be nothing between them, now or ever. Only one of those things is something he can actually have. “… To be of use.”

“I want,” Yuuri whispers, and for a moment the enormity of those two words alone daunts him, even as he tries to rise and fall on the join of their bodies.  _ I want to carry you with me, tomorrow. _

If their lovemaking in the teahouse had been slow, and soft; this is anything but: Victor surges up, and kisses him like a conqueror, and Yuuri gives himself over, again and again, to conquest. He is the son of a man whose empire extends so far and so wide that the sun never sets upon it, so he knows a thing or two about vanquished lands. What he is giving to Victor now has nothing to do with his body. Victor turns them over, pressing Yuuri underneath the lean, strong lines of his body, and loops an arm under Yuuri’s knees. Yuuri bites his own knuckles to swallow the shout Victor nearly punches out of his body. Of course it would be Victor, who would climb into these places, of course —

Yuuri babbles, reduced to nonsense. “Only you,” he whispers harshly, as he nips at Victor’s ear, his neck, claws at his back.  _ No one else will ever have this.  _ No one else will come along to rip love out of Yuuri the way Victor does.

The guttural sound Victor makes leaves Yuuri reflecting on how joy and anguish are closer than he ever thought, and when Victor reaches to stroke him, he plummets over the blade’s edge of difference between the two, sees white — 

— “When is your wedding,” Victor asks, as they lay together in the dark. He has sucked a fresh bruise onto the inside of Yuuri’s thigh, and the ridge of his hip, and there’s a bite-mark on his own shoulder from where Yuuri buried the urge to shout his name into Victor’s flesh instead. 

“At the start of Spring.” Yuuri imagines the Victor who has crossed a continent to be where he is now must be crafting a countdown in his head. He does not like it, this calendar of an inevitable departure. He thinks of Yuuko, and closes his mouth before the truth has a chance to spill out of it. What does it matter? Someday he will be the Emperor and there will be stories told about his reign; in mythological time, Victor has already left him. “When the cherry blossoms bloom.” 

How easy it is to go from the heights of pleasure to the valley of despair. Once, Yuuri’s grandfather told him a story while bitterly drunk.  _ Susano-o only pretended to make amends with his sister. They do not say that he built a throne for us out of  gilded fish hooks,  _ the old man said,  _ and once a man sits on it, he must stay on it until he dies, or it will rend flesh and unmask him.  _ He died not terribly long afterwards, and then Toshiya sat on the throne, and Yuuri has always wondered how they are meant to lead anyone when they cannot even defend themselves from the power of a chair. He will spend the rest of his life in a golden labyrinth; Victor, at least, he can return to the open air of the steppes, to the brilliant sunsets he’s described, to his home in the West. From his stories, Yuuri knows he has a father, a brother, people Yuuri will never meet and whose faces he cannot imagine. “… When will your caravan depart?”

Victor’s breath is fragile, like at any moment something between them will shatter him. “Spring.”

Yuuri kisses him. It is not enough, it will never be. But it is all he has.


	3. 3 / what you are smuggling;

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the museums never can tell you who the gifts were made for.

_ This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess  _ **_what you are smuggling:_ ** _ moods, states of grace, elegies! _

\- Italo Calvino,  _ Invisible Cities _

 

**\- - -**

 

**Light-colored glazed vase with peony and lily carvings.  Katsuki Era.** **_Treasures from the Silk Road._ ** **_  
_ ** **13 May - 19 May 2018. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan.**

_ Victor’s room shouldn’t be this empty,  _ Yuuri thinks when he leaves. Every part of him protests his departure, even though Victor has never been a place he’s meant to stay. He swallows regret and gratitude in equal measure; Victor’s arms have given him, however briefly, the most dreamless sleep he’s had in years. The next day, he makes arrangements with one of the stewards of the household, and this is how it begins: with fresh trimmings of the only plant hardy enough to bloom in the imperial garden at this time of year: twigs of Japanese apricot, whose pale pink flowers as they fall against the snow remind Yuuri of the way Victor blushes in the moonlight: softly, as an omen of the sweet, ripe thing that always comes after.

 

**\- - -**

 

**Jade comb with dancer engraving. Katsuki Era.** **_Treasures from the Silk Road._ ** **_  
_ ** **13 May - 19 May 2018. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan.**

“You want to buy a comb from me,” Christophe repeats. 

It’s not really the comb that Victor wants.

“I want to  _ barter  _ for a comb from you,” Victor responds, trying to school his expression. In this he is as successful as he has been in his effort not to fall in love with the Crown Prince. In his quarters, there are several vases full of sprigs of the subtle, pale flowers that bloom on some of the trees in the Emperor’s garden, and Victor is drunk on his own delight. Today even Mickey’s proselytizing cannot dampen his mood: Victor has fumbled his way to paradise twice now,  and he knows, with perfect clarity, that there cannot possibly be damnation in Yuuri’s kiss. 

Still, one joy deserves another. The comb is something Christophe picked up from a jade trader in China, the kind of thing he’ll fence to a pretty lady once they make the return trip across the continent. “I’ve got the embroidered bolts,” Victor offers. “From the mainland. You can take them. I don’t care.”

There are so many other things he could pick through: a gilded box, sweet-smelling incense, tapestries. Victor wants the comb. He wants it because it’s something Yuuri can use every single day, and because a selfish, feral part of him wants the teeth of this comb to glide through the black curtain of Yuuri’s hair, and for Yuuri to think of Victor’s hands.

Christophe gives him a long look. “The tapestry from Almaty.” It’s a bad trade and Victor knows it: the comb’s probably worth double, considering, but Christophe merely tilts his head. True to his word, they have never spoken about the tea house, and they do not speak of it now. “Just be careful,” he tells Victor, when they’ve made the exchange: the tapestry and some ingots, because Victor is too proud for any additional charity and too grateful for the original gift Christophe once gave him, leading him through a maze of curtains and rooms, and pushing him through the one door that would let Victor stumble into rapture.

 

**\- - -**

 

**Sutra book cover. Katsuki Era.** **_Treasures from the Silk Road._ ** **_  
_ ** **13 May - 19 May 2018. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan.**

“Will he even be able to read it?”  Minako-dono wants to know, as Yuuri fits a copy of the Lotus Sutra into an embroidered sleeve. Yuuri gives the circumspect answer:  _ it’s an important cultural text,  _ he says,  _ something he can study on his return journey.  _ It is a half-truth: he does wish for Hasetsu to be well-represented back in the West, among the Christians who, based on his interactions with the caravan’s priest, seem to think the world is no longer mysterious. 

It is also a complete deception. Yuuri knows where the scrolls and papers of the imperial library are kept, and that he can easily exchange one sheaf of writings for another. And that is a good thing: it will take months, years maybe, for Victor to translate the lurid, explicit parts of the text, and when he reads it he will think of Yuuri, and therein will be their shared secret, their pact of thieves: that Yuuri has stolen the Kama Sutra from his family’s library; that Victor has stolen Yuuri’s heart. 

At night he combs his hair with a jade comb featuring an engraved dancer. Yuuri pauses once it’s neat, and reaches for his dagger to cut a lock off. He presses it between specific pages; smiles.

_ So long as lips shall kiss, and eyes shall see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. _

 

**\- - -**

 

**Drawing of a man in a European style, thought to be a noble of the Katsuki court.** **_Treasures from the Silk Road._ ** **_  
_ ** **13 May - 19 May 2018. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan.**

“Sit still,” Victor instructs, contradictory with his piercing eyes and flickering smile. Yuuri sighs and directs his gaze to the bones in Victor’s wrist while he sketches. Even this simple act contains such grace and purpose that Yuuri thinks it is a mistake that Victor is not a King, himself. He draws Yuuri differently than the artists of the court, who follow a specific traditional styling, who create gilded narrative screens: this is an intimate portrait, and Yuuri recognizes himself not because of what he’s wearing or where he’s positioned on the page, but because of the way his eyes are anchored on the artist.

“I do not think I am that lovely,” Yuuri murmurs, when he sees the final result. Because they are alone, for now, Victor leans over and kisses him, just between the furrows of his eyebrows. 

It is a mystery that every place Victor kisses is a road that leads to Yuuri’s heart. “You are the most lovely,” he replies, so earnest that Yuuri can almost believe him.

 

**\- - -**

 

**Typical court attire of a noble: hitatare with sakurasou pattern, including pair of swords. Katsuki era.** **  
** **_Treasures from the Silk Road._ ** **13 May - 19 May 2018. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan.**

An attendant smooths the wine-colored silk of Victor’s new hitatare over his broad shoulders, and then fixes the tie of the belt around his trim waist. Yuuri has used the excuse of his upcoming wedding to order appropriate robes for each of their foreign guests. Two other pieces, in olive green and black, and already delivered to Giacometti and Crispino, are small expenses for the excuse to linger like this during Victor’s final fitting, sipping barley tea and hiding his smile within the curve of his cup. 

“You did well,” he murmurs. On the surface this is a compliment to the seamstress; there is a second world in which what he really says is  _ you look beautiful.  _ In the past weeks, Yuuri has become an expert at this kind of double-speak, an encoded language which only exists between Victor and himself. Sometimes it is as obtuse as this; other times, he slips a piece of paper into the lantern that hangs outside the building where Victor sleeps, a method which is much, much more direct, and which has brought Victor to his room late at night more than once, traversing the palace’s hidden passageways guided by an invisible string between them, which only he and Yuuri can feel. 

Yuuri feels, more than he sees, Victor’s eyes on him, as he rises and turns towards a stand in the corner, where a pair of swords have been resting innocuously in a display case this entire time. Though, Yuuri supposes, there can never be anything innocuous about a blade. 

At the Emperor’s request, Victor has given demonstrations using the Russian saber he’s carried with him across the steppes, and he is brilliant with it: in his bouts with Giacometti, his darting steps are always just a little faster, his strikes just a little more deadly, and Yuuri remembers the thrill he got when he first saw Victor disarm the Swiss trader. Because Toshiya is magnanimous, and proud of his samurai, a subsequent exhibition saw a bout between the Fujiwara and Minami boys; Kenjirou triumphed and immediately dedicated his victory towards his role model, declaring:  _ Crown Prince Yuuri is the best swordsman in the Court. _

After that, there had been no appeasing Victor’s insatiable curiosity. Yuuri knows he’s begged lessons in kenjutsu from the guards and the daimyo, and though he still moves slowly through his katas, Yuuri sees the raw potential in his steps, the bright flash of prodigy. They have sparred before, too, out in the courtyard, terribly late at night, where Yuuri bests him again and again until Victor begs for a break, hands on his knees, begging for mercy or praising all of Yuuri’s hidden strength between desperate pants for breath.

Yuuri stalks towards him now, feeling the weight of the katana and its matching wakizashi. They are well-balanced, good swords, and in them Yuuri feels the potential they bear for a deadly, killing strike, executed so quickly that someday even one of the shinobi might envy Victor’s dexterity.  Wordlessly he stands chest-to-chest with Victor, sliding the swords into the tight loop of his belt. His hand lingers on Victor’s hip for a breath longer than necessary , and he brushes the sakurasou emblems embroidered in white on the robe’s edges, before he steps back and smiles subtly. They have discussed mons and coats of arms; after Victor sees that they have given Christophe something to match his castle crest, he will be curious, and perhaps he will point to the flower and ask:  _ what does this mean? _

“You should grow your hair out,” Yuuri murmurs. “Then you’ll really look the part.”

It would take Victor, who keeps his hair short, though his platinum bangs are over-long and always in his eyes, years. 

They both close their eyes, imagining the luxury of so much time.

 

**\- - -**

 

**Slavic Svirel, from the Hasetsu Castle collection. Katsuki era.** **_Treasures from the Silk Road._ ** **13 May - 19 May 2018. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan.**

“What do you call that?” Victor wants to know, gesturing to the court musician playing on a wooden flute. There are only a few of them arranged on the patio, and his presence next to the Prince is tolerated among tonight’s small audience. They are sitting so close to each other that if he shifted his hand just a little, from where his weight rests back on his palms, their fingers would brush, or perhaps their knees would bump together. It’s a tempting proposition, but sometimes Victor can simply watch as Yuuri reacts to one thing, or another, and realize that they are already in the same place, thinking and feeling the same things. “I like it.”

“Shakuhachi,” says Yuuri. His eyes are crinkled at the corners, the way they get when he’s smiling without smiling. “Why do you like it?”

“There is an instrument back home that’s similar.” Victor has a svirel in his saddlebag, which has been company and a reminder of home on the long roads he’s traveled to be here. “I will show you,” he promises, “later.”

What might it have been like to be out under the stars, with Yuuri’s head against his shoulders, and no one else to hear the music they make for miles; no one to witness them but the stars?

 

**\- - -**

 

**Cups and sake jar, used for** **_San San Kudo_ ** **. Katsuki era.** **_Treasures from the Silk Road._ ** **_  
_ ** **13 May - 19 May 2018. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan.**


	4. 4 / always, in this garden;

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a pair of weddings.

_ KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden. _

_ POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again,  _ **_always, in this garden,_ ** _ at this hour of the evening, in your august presence. _

 

\- Italo Calvino,  _ Invisible Cities _

 

**\- - -**

 

Lacquer boats with great silk canopies drift serenely across the water garden; Victor’s long-since stopped marveling at the way the water doesn’t freeze in the winter, kept just above freezing by the presence of the nearby hot springs. Handfuls of courtiers are settled in this boat or that; Yuuri and Victor are alone; Victor pilots them underneath the high arch of a moon-shaped bridge at Yuuri’s request. Several of the other boats are larger, and will not follow them into the next part of the garden; Victor dares to think this has been Yuuri’s entire aim. “Over there,” he directs, with a slight dip of his chin, referring to a portion of the pond that curls underneath the twisted branches of a winter-stripped willow. The buds will come soon enough, Victor knows, but it’s a reminder that he does not want: Lady Toyomura is in another boat, and as soon as the sakura blossoms, she will be Yuuri’s wife.

The prow of the boat slices through the serene, still surface of the pond; Victor stops his paddling, and lets them drift. “Come here,” says Yuuri, quietly, and so Victor comes and sits on the bench opposite him, surrounded by a screen which Yuuri let down ages ago, to block out the afternoon sun. The voices of the rest of the court are distant; he sees only the late-winter marvel spread out before them, separate and secret.

Yuuri drops a hand on his leg, studying their reflections in the glass surface of the pond, and his fingers creep higher until Victor is keenly aware of their tangle in his laces. “Yuuri,” he hisses under his breath, voice reedy and thin. Yuuri will not be the one who suffers if they are discovered, but Victor can’t help but imagine it anyway, being seen; the whole court discovering just who it is he’s given himself over to time and time again like this. Yuuri quiets him with a finger pressed to Victor’s mouth as he reaches inside of his trousers and strokes Victor into fullness.

“You’re so beautiful,” whispers Yuuri, whose gaze lingers on the column of Victor’s throat as he throws his head back. Suddenly Victor can feel none of the chill of the garden, only the heat of Yuuri’s hand and a tingling sensation in his toes. “Look at me, Victor,” Yuuri directs, and from the haze of his pleasure Victor struggles to comply. The look he receives when their eyes do finally meet is so wanton and so pointed that Victor’s hit with a full-body shudder, and from there Yuuri makes quick work of undoing him so completely that Victor has to surge forward to crash their lips together to swallow the shout built up in his throat as he comes.

Yuuri smiles more serenely than he has any right to, rolling back his sleeve to trail his messy hand through the water. Victor thinks to reach for him, even through all of the layers of silk and cloth, but Yuuri shakes his head, eyes faintly mischievous. “Come to my rooms tonight,” he says. Victor has been there all too often these past few weeks, but they both already know he’ll creep in yet again. 

In many ways, he never leaves.

 

**\- - -**

 

When the first cherry blossoms bloom, Victor accompanies Christophe into the village, which is also beginning to wake with signs of spring: there are sailors in the harbor once more, attending to their ships. One of these will eventually ferry their caravan back to the mainland, and then they will begin the long, slow journey back west.

Victor tries to imagine returning to those silent, lonely nights, but he is too distracted by the unfurling of flowers. His imagination runs wild, gone feral with the thought of Yuuri kissing anyone else, and he gets riotously drunk. 

Christophe helps him back to the palace complex, and says nothing. There the bustle of the upcoming nuptials sweeps everyone under a current of energy and activity; and the thorn inside Victor’s chest worries itself deeper, because he doesn’t see Yuuri again for four days. He’s lying awake, sleepless, on the fourth night, staring up at his mosquito netting when a quiet knock sounds at his door, and then the screen slides open, and the source of all of Victor’s wanting carefully steps inside, balancing a tray with two bottles of sake and several cups between his hands. For the first time, Victor does not rush to him, and everything he considers saying gets caught up in the tangle of briars in his chest. Yuuri, too, is quiet; he leaves one bottle next to one of the vases and frowns, briefly, running his finger over a wilting petal. The flowers need to be refreshed, but Victor wonders if there’s any point in it.

“I’ve missed you,” Yuuri admits quietly, padding over to Victor’s bed. He gracefully parts the curtains, and sits on the mattress, and now Victor can see what remains on the tray Yuuri carries: a single kettle, and six small cups in two stacks of three. It’s a strange arrangement for drinking, if that’s what Yuuri wants to do; there’s just the two of them, and three sips are not going to give Victor the oblivion he’s hungry for.

“Yuuri,” he murmurs, but nothing else comes, and Yuuri glances up with a knowing look before carefully folding his sleeves.

“This is a tradition of ours, drinking in this way. Have you seen it before?”

“No.”

“These are sakazuki,” Yuuri says carefully. Victor watches him as he pours, careful not to spill. “The first cup, we say, represents heaven.” He distributes the top cup with unusual formality, managing, even here, to deliver it to Victor with a slight bow. “Sip,” he says softly. “It’s meant to be savored.” He watches, without smiling, as Victor does so, then pours his own glass and does the same. They repeat the process twice more, once, Yuuri says, for earth, and once again, for humankind. 

“I don’t understand,” Victor admits, as Yuuri sets the tray aside. 

Yuuri hesitates, running a thumb across the lifeline of his palm. Perhaps the map to him is there. Victor wonders which parts he has traversed, and how many places are still unknown lands. “... Three is a very lucky number,” he says, and looks up, eyes ablaze, for reasons Victor does not understand. What he does know is that deep inside of Yuuri there is something that burns, and that sometimes, like this, he can no longer contain the heat of it. “Three is a number that cannot be divided in half. And three times three is nine, which is a very sacred number.” He climbs closer, over Victor’s lap, and presses a hand to Victor’s heart, cups his cheek. “You cannot divide people who have done this,” Yuuri whispers, and Victor sees that he is close to crying, poised right on the brink of tears. “We’re indivisible, now.”

Victor cannot help himself. He swiftly falls into one kiss, and then another, until he is naked and writhing under the obscene heat of Yuuri’s mouth. They have become the most attentive students of each other’s bodies, quick learners as they fumble towards pleasure. It makes Victor think of the stories he’s heard, traveling east, of lovers born to each other again and again. Between Yuuri’s hands at the base of Victor’s cock, or the maddening work of his tongue at its head, Victor is certain he is being spun out of himself, worked apart into only his raw materials.

There is nowhere he feels more himself than when Yuuri is looking at him, as he does now, from underneath the pretty curl of his lashes, taking Victor deep into the back of his throat. 

When Victor comes, it’s with a shout, but it’s as he shivers later while Yuuri swallows and gently kisses up his abdomen that the confession locked into his chest slips out of it, a thief in broad daylight.

“I love you,” he says, and he considers the sake, and what it was Yuuri must have meant by it. There is a very real possibility that he will never love anyone else.

Victor does not truly understand what any of it means until two days later, when he watches the bride and the groom stand in front of a local Shinto priest. Michele shifts uncomfortably next to him, muttering his surprise that a wedding this ostentatious could also be so simple. Of course, he does not believe in what’s unfolding; according to the priest, only the blessing of God can make a union unbreakable.

Victor is hardly able to catch his breath. There are roses left by Yuuri’s mouth still blooming under his hitatare. He can’t take his eyes off of the proceedings; the same formality with which the sake is dispensed into two neatly stacked tiers of very similar sipping cups. His eyes linger on the line of Yuuri’s throat.

He never swallows.

_ Oh,  _ he thinks, and suddenly he feels very distant from his body, foreign to himself _. That was … _

 

**\- - -**

 

(Two nights before, lying side by side, everything discarded but the skin they both live in, he remembers asking:  _ will you lie with her? _

_ No,  _ Yuuri said, his eyes strangely bright in the dark _. Never. _ )


	5. 5 / the faint lights in the distance;

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> mind the tags. the two worst ones come true in this chapter.

_If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at_ ** _the faint lights in the distance._**  

\- Italo Calvino,  _ Invisible Cities _

 

**\- - -**

 

“You didn’t tell me  _ san san kudo  _ was a tradition from weddings,” Victor teases. It’s one day after the big event and he’s managed to find Yuuri alone in one of the long palace hallways, has crowded him up against the wall with a brush of fingers and a smile so big it stretches the edge of his face. That Yuuri can blush so beautifully, rosy as the dawn, leaves him a little breathless and lost, but not unpleasantly so: awash in some thick, golden feeling that washes over Victor like a thick, rolling fog until it’s the only thing he sees. This must be what it is like to roam beautiful places without agenda or purpose; to exist, to enjoy. “Is that what you wanted,” he whispers, nosing against Yuuri’s chin. “To be wed?”

“I - I …” Yuuri’s fingers fist in Victor’s tunic, and he smiles for a moment, but not in a way that satisfies, because sadness blooms in his gaze and soon his mien is serious. “I wanted something that would show you how much you mean to me,” he whispers. “Something that would keep us together even after you go home.”

It’s a cruel reminder, a piece of flint struck between his ribs. Christophe has already told Victor the ships have already begun to depart and that their charter will return to the mainland in three weeks. Victor has tried not to think about it, but right now, the idea that has been gathering momentum and coalescing in his mind crystallizes into words:  _ I could stay. I could stay and never leave.  _ “What if I don’t?”

“What?” Yuuri asks, his eyes wide. Then someone coughs in the distance; it’s his guard, Nishigori, who is pointedly and politely looking the other way. They quickly separate, and just in time; Yuuri’s sister comes around the corner with a few of her attendants. Victor has only briefly met Princess Mari, though he's been told all about her.  _ Married to a samurai and living in Edo,  _ he remembers. 

Her gaze is more direct than any of the other ladies as the court as she looks at Yuuri, and then at Victor. “Good morning,” Mari murmurs, with a knowing, pointed smile. Victor suddenly recalls that Yuuri’s wife spent the better part of a year hosted in her household, prior to this winter. The two ladies must be friends. The brightness of his mood dissipates like a morning mist struck away by the heat of the sun, erased by sobering truth: even if he let the caravan return without him, moments like this one would always be stolen and secret.

“Good morning,” Yuuri murmurs back. Victor bows as she passes by.

“Will you come join us in the garden, brother?”

“Yes,” Yuuri murmurs, though his eyes dart back to Victor as soon as her back is to them both. “... I’ll be right there.” After Mari has turned another corner, he reaches up, and cups the side of Victor’s face. “You have a family too,” Yuuri reminds Victor gently. “I could never do that to you.”

Left alone in an empty hallway, Victor leans against the wall, eyes the painted tiles of the patterned ceiling. “What if I wanted you to,” he mutters, to no one, thinking of all of the miles he’s put between himself and his father, his brother, even an angry, green-eyed cousin who’s probably due to inherit everything of importance someday. On the silk road, and here, he has been no one but himself.

He gathers more and more of who he is in every moment he steals with Yuuri, who reflects him like the clearest mirror; to return is to contemplate shedding his own skin. Victor is no longer sure he knows the way back.

 

**\- - -**

 

After dinner, by some miracle, he has Yuuri back in his bed; he’s beautiful like this, on his hands and knees, and Victor has already kissed his way down every vertebrae, skimmed over the feverish planes of Yuuri’s chest. Now, Victor’s poised just between the backs of Yuuri’s powerful thighs, hands planted on his ass. He’s pressing filthy, wet kisses into the tight ring of muscle there, working Yuuri open with his tongue until he’s panting and clawing at the mattress. “Victor,” he breathes, and when Victor reaches up to touch him, to let Yuuri fuck into his fist, his voice grows louder and wilder, until he’s spilling over the sheets with a drawn out shout. 

It’s at that moment that the door to Victor’s room slides open. “All this time on the silk road and you never once fell for this depravity,” he hears, and dimly recognizes the voice as Michele’s. Crispino’s lecture is cut off by a shocked gasp: Victor turns to look at him and knows what he sees. “This -- you -- the Prince -- it’s ---” 

Before Victor can react, Yuuri’s voice rings like steel. 

“Guards,” he shouts, scrambling out of Victor’s embrace and reaching for his robes, “arrest this man.”

 

**\- - -**

 

_ This is how this ends,  _ Victor thinks dimly, surveying the assembly in one of the palace courtyards. Crispino is accompanied by Nishigori and another of the guards, and even Christophe is there, summoned out of his own quarters by the argument in the hallway. Yuuri and Victor are both barely presentable. Victor wants to reach out and straighten the hasty knots tied around Yuuri’s waist, aches to touch him, but for now Yuuri is mostly gone from him, replaced by the blank face of an untouchable prince he remembers meeting back in the fall.

Christophe moves a little closer, sending surreptitious glances Victor’s way, but there’s no time to talk: one of the stewards has gone to fetch the royal family, and they’re here now: Emperor Toshiya, his wife, and Mari, stepping out onto the porch. “My son,” Toshiya says. “What is the meaning of this?” 

“I want to send the priest into exile.” Yuuri points; Michele flinches. Toshiya’s gentle expression does not change. Victor sees instead that he and Yuuri are being studied by Hiroko and Mari, and waits for condemnation to bleed into their gazes. It does not arrive; he supposes it’s one last mercy offered here, at what may very well be the end of his life.

“We do not simply punish men without cause,” replies the Emperor, and he glances towards Michele. The priest mistakes this for permission, and seizes upon his chance to talk.

“Your son is an adulterer and a sodomist,” he snaps back in the one language he, Victor, and Christophe all share. When met with blank stares, he hisses in Christophe’s direction.  _ “Translate,”  _ he insists, and Victor’s eyes go wide with the implications as he looks between Michele and the one friend he can say that he’s made, these many, many months.

It was Christophe who opened the door that has led him to this courtyard, and now Michele Crispino is insisting he set it on fire.

“Forgive me, your majesty,” Christophe murmurs, in the language of their hosts, with a sweeping bow. Toshiya's eyes linger on him. “My companion has forgotten his manners, and has not received your permission to speak.”

“He has the right to defend himself and he may in a moment. Yuuri, what are your accusations?”

“He is a meddler and a spy,” Yuuri responds, tonelessly. Victor recognizes the tension in his back and sees that one fist is clenched so tightly that his knuckles have gone white. He wants nothing more than to step forward and wrap him back up in an embrace, but here the difference between them is too pronounced. 

“The white devil has seduced your son, Toshiya-tenn ō,” the older guard states, directing a flat, judgmental glare in Victor’s direction. Christophe’s hand falls on Victor’s shoulder, but he barely feels it: there is a stone falling through his stomach, now, and Victor does not know when it will hit bottom. “The priest discovered them.”

“How dare you think you have the right to speak in this courtyard,” Yuuri snaps. His words fly so fast and so fierce that Victor is left scrambling to catch them. He has only ever seen Yuuri wear his power softly, like a heavy cloak he’d prefer to disregard; in front of him now is the rage of a future emperor, unfurling, and it is as dangerous to witness as holy fire. “The idiot priest has learned nothing in his time here, so convinced of the superiority of his god, but  _ you  _ serve the imperial house and if you hope to be allowed to continue you will apologize at once --”

He immediately extracts a deep and apologetic bow, though the old guard stumbles in his surprise as he bends to do it. Michele seems to think the conversation has gone on long enough without his input. “What will you do, Victor?” He asks, now, turning back to Victor. “Have your lover execute me? It won’t save you from hell.”

“Fine words from a man who sent his sister to convent because of his own sinful impulses,” Victor retorts swiftly. This is the wrong thing to say, but there is deep satisfaction in freeing the words that have been held back behind the grinding of his teeth for the better part of several years. It is an arrow loosed for the heart of its target, aflame, and predictably, Crispino ignites.

“You’d better hope for death,” he sneers. “I will go back across this godforsaken country and tell your father, your family, the church. Your excommunication will be a joy.” Ahead of him, Yuuri is turning to look helplessly at Victor; neither he nor his family understand a word of the priest’s vile, self-righteous ramblings. Nishigori drops a meaty hand to the Michele’s shoulders in a warning, but this doesn’t stop his shouting. “And when they ask about this place, this great court of Hasetsu, the mighty Emperor who rules half the earth, I’ll tell them the truth,” he hisses. “I will tell them that it is a hotbed of sin and depravity, and that the Prince is the worst of them all, whoring himself out --”

_ There.  _ The stone hits bottom and Victor erupts on impact. He recalls his kenjutsu lessons as he rushes forward in blind fury:  _ the katana, meant to be drawn and to strike in the same singular, killing blow,  _ and he hears it, the unsheathing of steel, the whistle of the blade.

He barely registers the resistance of the body before he even realizes what he’s done. Michele falls, and Victor drops Nishigori’s blood-stained katana. 

If there is any truth to hell, Mickey’s right; he’ll go there now. 

Later, he will wonder why Yuuri’s best guard didn’t bother to stop him. 

In the courtyard the priest is dead, his eyes still wide with shock; the rising wound across his chest is ugly and severe. Around Victor the courtyard tiles are a map, and Crispino’s blood does the work of a topographer, marking the borders of each square in crimson.

Amidst the shouts that immediately follow, Yuuri is the one who sweeps forward, who wraps himself over Victor’s back to stop the other guard from reacting, who puts his arms around Victor’s chest while he dry-heaves.

“Leave us,” says Toshiya. It is the first time the mild-mannered man has issued so direct and so harsh a command. “All of you.”

This is how they come to be: Victor and the imperial family, alone in a courtyard with a dead man. “I’m sorry,” Victor whispers. He does not yet fully understand his actions. He thought he understood all of the risks. He has already accepted the possibility of the loss of his own reputation, his title, the salvation he only barely believes in. Victor can imagine himself excommunicated and disowned, back out in the wilderness, making due with the merchants as they traverse a wild and unexplored world. He is a talented fellow; a linguist, a fighter. He has been prepared to forge a life on those merits alone, without his name to accompany them.  It is the ruining of Yuuri he cannot live with: all of the hatred of Rome brought down onto the Chrysanthemum Throne for the thing that lives between them, bright and golden, the truest joy Victor has ever known.

How poisonous the world has gotten, that Michele could witness such love, and only see sin.

“Victor-san,” says Toshiya, whose voice is stern but not unkind. Victor looks up to see that he has stepped in front of his wife, perhaps to spare her the view. At his feet, Michele’s eyes are unblinking and accusing. It is hard not to stare back.  _ Will his sister miss him, I wonder.  _ “You are a storyteller, are you not?”

Stories are going to be all he has left. Stories and the ghost of Yuuri’s kiss. He swallows and wipes his mouth; the back of his hand comes away with streaks of red; the evidence of his crime must be splattered all over his clothes. Victor feels his knees threaten to buckle, is surprised to find that Yuuri still holds him, resolute. 

The Emperor and his family are waiting, still. It is Princess Mari who steps forward, leaning against a pillar, folding her arms into her sleeves. She glances at the body with an expression of distaste but no shock or trembling. Of course; she is the wife of a warrior. 

“Nikiforov,” she echoes. This time it is not a question. “Start from the beginning.”

Victor takes in a deep breath.  _ If the last story I ever tell is of us, _  he wonders, feeling Yuuri reach for his hand and stubbornly knot their fingers together -- 

\--  _it will have been worth it._


	6. 6 / without stones there is no arch;

_ “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.' _

_ Polo answers: _ **_'Without stones there is no arch.”_ **

 

\- Italo Calvino,  _ Invisible Cities _

 

**\- - -**

 

By the time he’s escorted back to his quarters, alone, Victor is emptied of self: he has sat, well-through moonrise, trying to put words to feelings which are indescribable. He rinses off slowly, ignores the pink tint of the basin, the dead wilt of stems of flowers in his room. He is as poured-out as a jug of vinegar; he is the wine, when it sours in bad skins. When he lays down he can no longer detect Yuuri amidst his quilts, and he dreads what he’ll see when he finally succumbs to sleep like a city under siege: slowly, and with resistance until the bitter, deadly end. 

In his nightmares, Michele Crispino lights the Paschal candle and pours the wax over Victor’s mouth, and down his throat, forming the sort of seal only to be broken at the ending of worlds.  _ You took everything from me,  _ he says, as Victor claws at his neck, and tries to find the words, the breath to speak.  _ Now I will take everything from you. _

_ Victor. _

He tosses and turns, feels hands clawing at his shoulders, fingers tied around his wrists.

_ Victor, wake up. _

It’s not until Victor feels someone’s lips pressed to his that he startles awake; recognizes Yuuri’s face, tries to jerk backwards. Yuuri does not let him go, feathering soft kisses over Victor’s cheeks, his temple, the corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier,” he says gently, as his hands smooth over Victor’s shoulders. Yuuri maps out the edges of him without desperation or desire, trying to find the places where one of them ends and the other begins.

Victor crumbles under his gentleness, feels his breath catch, and tries without success to keep his eyes closed so that he might hold back his tears.

“Why are you crying,” Yuuri wants to know, brushing aside his bangs, stroking the water away from Victor’s cheeks. “You despised the Priest long before you struck him.”

Victor cannot help himself; he weeps harder, goes without resistance as he’s gathered into Yuuri’s arms. “There was a purity to this,” he tries and fails to explain. There has been, between Yuuri and himself, something like a pure and unfiltered light, clear as the morning, luminous. Now he has sullied it, somehow, he’s certain of it. 

Yuuri gathers his face in his hands and looks at Victor with incredible kindness. “We have a pottery tradition here,” he explains quietly. “When something valuable breaks, our craftsmen can put it back together with gold. You can see the seams in the ceramic, brighter than ever. But sometimes the piece comes back more beautiful than it was before it was broken. The damage done to it becomes part of its story. The repair is what made it lovely.”

Victor imagines it must be a painful process, to be put back together with molten, golden heat. It is painful now to be held in the loose circle of Yuuri’s arms, and offered kindness that he does not deserve. “I am not sure your father will see things that way.”

“My father sees a man with more loyalty to our house than to his own,” says Yuuri, softly, “who has ruined himself to keep his son safe.”

 

**\- - -**

 

Victor begins the second day in the liminal space that is neither freedom nor hell, waking to a delicate rap of knuckles on the door to his quarters. He has been confined, largely, to this part of the palace at the Emperor’s request as Toshiya takes several days to deliberate. “Come in,” Victor murmurs, because in truth he no longer cares who it is who comes to see him now. He still feels beyond himself, past caring about his own material details. 

The shock of Yuuri’s wife, carrying a tea tray, rattles him back into reality with surprising force.

“Lady Yuuko.”

“Nikiforov-san.” She offers a polite smile, and moves to the low table in the corner, kneeling with incredible grace through layer upon layer of kimono. Yuuko brushes the fresh bundle of flowers Yuuri brought himself the day before with a momentarily fond look that Victor catches himself resenting.

He reminds himself that of the two of them, she has far more reason to despise him, what with what he’s stolen out of the marriage bed promised to her, and swallows the bitter taste of his own envy as he moves to take the opposite seat. “This is a surprise.”

“It really isn’t,” Yuuko demurs. “Tea?”

_ Have you come to poison me,  _ Victor wonders, because he detects no malice in her eyes, and can think of no reason which might account for kindness instead. She will be the Empress one day; he cannot refuse. “Please.”

“I thought I might tell you a story,” Yuuko explains. She pours beautifully, without a drop spilled. “Though now that I think about it, it’s really two stories. Both of them involve three children. I think I will not be as good with words as you are, Nikiforov-san.” To this, Victor does not know what to say; instead he adheres himself to the rules he’s learned surrounding tea, and waits. “... There was once a young prince,” she explains. “He was many years younger than his older sister, and it was his father’s wish that he have playmates, and it was convenient that in the court itself two such candidates existed: a girl, born just the year before, and the steward’s son, about the same age. Now the girl was of noble birth: in this court, there have been many princes, for many long years, and as not all of them could be emperors, they formed clans of their own, lineages that pride themselves in also tracing back to the gods … but the boy, the steward’s child, he could not quite say the same. You see, the steward’s wife was barren, and he had taken a low-born mistress, and though he recognized the child, no one else quite forgot that the prince was a prince, and the lady a lady, and the steward’s son a bastard. The children, of course, did not care. In their own eyes they were close friends, adventurers and equals. Only as the grew older did the differences become more pronounced: the prince was told that he would attend special studies, that might prepare him for rule, and the steward’s son that he would need to go to extraordinary lengths to prove himself, if he ever wanted to really secure his place in the court. The girl was told that her duty was to find a husband, and not just any husband, but the very best one.  _ You should marry the prince,  _ they all said. But I see in your eyes you understand this. There are courts much the same where you are from, are there not? And you are a second son.”

“I am,” Victor confirms. He finds himself more sympathetic than he expected; Mila is, by now, at an age where no doubt she’s being told to find a husband, and soon some poor lady will be expected to deal with the volatility of young Yura’s temper.

“Is this why you sought your fortune in unknown lands, flung far from home?”

“Only partially.” Victor has never been able to imagine taking a wife, and he has not needed fame or fortune, though at times he has experienced both. He realizes now it was perhaps the challenge of the expedition itself that drew him: the promise of something so difficult that it would refine him and reforge him, offer the great clarity of discovering not some distant place, but himself by comparison. 

He has used the roads as his mirror. They have brought him to Yuuri.

Yuuko offers him a subtle smile, which he cannot decode. “You will understand that I envy the luxury soon enough,” she murmurs. “The prince, though, let us linger on him; he is why you are still listening to me at all. He became quieter, more conscious of duty. Around him something began to build a wall. I came to understand this thing as an interference of his future self, the emperor, the obligation that he insists that only he can carry. Around our other young friend a wall of a different sort was being constructed: not, as in the prince’s case, by himself, but by everyone around us.  _ Unworthy,  _ they said, though he was brave and bold and generous, with a big laugh and a warm heart.  _ Ill-mannered,  _ they said.  _ He gets that from his mother.  _ I saw the way these things hurt my friend, and I took them to heart, and I remember telling him one summer afternoon:  _ you shouldn’t listen to any of them. You’re worthy in my eyes.  _ I remember that he smiled at me and said that was all that mattered to him, and I suppose if I was a smarter girl, I would have recognized then the trouble I was in. It took longer for that sort of nonsense to reach the young prince, of course, but when it did he broke through the walls of himself for a moment and proved he was still our childhood friend.  _ This is Nishigori no Takeshi,  _ he said,  _ and he will someday be the Captain of my Guard. This is my will and because it is my will it is also the will of heaven.  _ I shivered, then, because I was not sure I wanted to be so close to someone who could make a thing so simply by speaking. But I was glad, because Takeshi had beaten all the other boys, except the prince, who was just a little faster, and a little cleverer, in their playing at war. I thought:  _ good, he will keep the prince safe.” _

Victor has forgotten his tea. 

“A few more years passed. The prince came to me once after a terrible thunderstorm with blisters on his fingers; I think he must have been practicing all night. _Yuuko, can you understand that I love you, but I do not want to marry you,_ he said, desperately, and I felt something come loose in my chest. Because I too loved the prince. But I did not want to marry him. That feeling carried me into a festival we have; you would love it, watching so many lanterns get lit … and we were younger, a year ago, I think. Much younger. Perhaps there was too much wine, but I don’t think that was it. I think it was the lanterns, and the feeling that our bodies might rise up with them, free from something as simple and as arbitrary as a drawn line. Do you know I kissed him first?”

“Sorry, who?”

“Takeshi, of course. It was kind of him, to lend you his sword, I thought.”

Takeshi.  _ Nishigori.  _ The guard who has done nothing, this entire time, but pretend to look the other way as Victor finds his way to Yuuri’s chambers, or as Yuuri comes to his. “I don’t understand.”

“Princess Mari says you are not as clever as her brother thinks,” Yuuko teases. “I think I see why, now. It was a happy moment, that day. I went to him more often than I should have, after, which I am certain  _ you  _ understand. But we were not as careful as we should have been. And one day it became evident to myself that I was not married to the prince, as everyone expected me to be, but that I was also carrying the child of a man no one would allow me to marry.”

“This is why you went to Edo,” Victor realizes, suddenly.

“Smarter than Mari thinks, though. But no, not quite.” Yuuko helps herself to a second cup, fixes her eyes on a point on the wall. “There is a specific system here, for dealing with one’s shame. Do not pretend you have not heard of it.”

Victor has. Long before his death, Michele had spoken with great disdain of the suicides of the samurai.  _ A grand but pointless gesture. Their love of their lords only condemns them to an eternity away from paradise.  _

“I was … Not myself,” Yuuko says. “You will think terribly of me, I think, that I did not tell Takeshi. But I know him well: he would compose a grand gesture, and we would flee, perhaps to another island or to a farm, or to the mainland, where we would struggle but be together, and I would be alive but only at the expense of having brought incredible shame on my father’s house. I would end, forever, its nobility. I see that this is a sacrifice you might have made, if you were me, but we are not each other. I was interrupted, preparing for the act. Discovered by the prince. You must understand that to do what he did a year and a half ago … It was … It was the perfect fusion of the boy I once knew, and the man they have all been building, these long years, readying for the throne. _You will go to Edo,_ he said. _You will go to Edo and Mari will lie about the child. And when you return, I will marry you._ _We will recognize them after._ He has never wanted to marry me, of course, but he is kinder than he ought to be. _You may have Takeshi. I do not care._ ”

He does not know what to say. The enormity of the tale rattles around inside of Victor's ribcage, trying to make a place big enough for it to reside. The three of them, he realizes suddenly, have borne the story alone; now he has been made party to it, entrusted with the great secret. “... You said it was two stories of three children.”

“It is.” Yuuko smiles, but this time Victor sees its edges. He cannot help but think of Yuuri’s story about the pottery, and he sees, for the first time, Yuuko’s seams. “You would not have believed how I looked, with my stomach so ripe. Do you know how many women die giving birth to just the one child? Mari does not think I will ever have another. But there are three of them, now: three little girls who have the boisterous personalities of their father, all safe in Princess Mari’s home. And do you know what else?”

“No.”

“Unless someday Mari has a son, one of them will sit on that horrible chair, the one we’ve all said belongs to the gods, and she will be the child of the boy they all said wasn’t good enough.”

Victor feels his fingers shake around the rim of the teacup; Yuuko surprises him by reaching out, and clasping his hand. “Why have you told me all of this?”

“I have watched you for so long. I do not think of Yuuri as my husband, but he is my friend, and I care how he feels. I see the way you look at him, and the way he looks at you, but sometimes …”

“Yes?”

“Do you know that someday I will be the Empress? In a strange twist of fate I now have that power I was once so afraid of. Sometimes I think that you are a man who is waiting for permission to love him, Nikiforov-san.” 

She gestures up towards the door. “Go. I will someday be the Empress, and this is the will of heaven.”


	7. 7 / there is the blueprint;

_ The sky is filled with stars.  _ **_"There is the blueprint,"_ ** _ they say. _

 

\- Italo Calvino,  _ Invisible Cities _

 

**\- - -**

 

_ Go,  _ she says, and so Victor does. He finds Yuuri in a courtyard with a bokken, practicing strokes, and takes only a moment to admire him as he moves: a selfish half-second that allows pleasure and pride to swell up in him in equal measure. Then he moves forward, first with just a single step, and then with more and more urgency, until he’s entirely ignored Yuuri’s nod of greeting, or his growing surprise.

It is their first kiss out in the open, in broad daylight.

“What was that for,” Yuuri wants to know. Victor does not step back, does not slink away. He reaches up to cup the side of Yuuri’s face with one hand and simply shakes his head.

“I love you,” he says. This, too, is the first time those words have seen the sun. “There doesn’t need to be any other reason.”

 

**\- - -**

 

“I feel like I need to apologize to you,” Christophe admits, the night before he’s due to leave. He and Victor are both deep into a bottle of sake, sitting on the floor in Christophe’s quarters, which are all-but-empty. Everything of importance is already on board the ship that will carry him back to the continent. 

“Whatever for?”

“I … I had my suspicions about you, while we were traveling here. When the Emperor was gracious enough to allow us to winter in the capital instead of returning to the mainland, I thought little of it.  _ Victor’s charmed us into an advantageous position again,  _ I joked. What with you and your stories. Do you remember those last weeks of fall, when I still had to sit around as your translator while we told the court about all the places we’ve traveled through?”

Victor smiles fondly. “I do.”

“Well … I kept catching the Prince looking at you, and when I’d see him at it he’d flush and look away. I’m wildly inappropriate at the best of times, so when I let it slip that I thought I could bring you to the teahouse, I mostly meant to tease him. It was an opportunity too good to refuse. Who else besides you is ever going to be able to say they made an Emperor blush ...”

“Christophe. If you’re apologizing for what happened there, you shouldn’t …”

“I’m apologizing for all of it,” Christophe murmurs. “The teahouse, the priest … Victor, you’ve told me stories this whole time about your father, your cousins. And now you’re going to stay here until you die?”

“More or less,” Victor confirms, examining the sake cup. He thinks back to the courtyard, cradling Yuuri’s face in his hand, tilting their foreheads together:  _ if you want to be rid of me tell your father to decide on exile and do it at once. Because if you don’t, I am going to stay here indefinitely. I am going to be here forever. _ “Leave atoning for Crispino to me.”

“I could have had him moved.”

Victor’s eyes narrow. A lot of things could have happened. “I could have softened the blow.” Then he pauses, contemplative. “Tell me you’ll get his sister out of convent, at least.”

“So stubborn,” Christophe murmurs. “I shall. But what will I tell  _ your _ family, when I return? Victor Nikiforov tells me that he will also die in Japan, even if it takes him much longer to do it ...”

“A version of the truth, I suppose. Tell them the Emperor’s son has three daughters to tutor, and need of a translator, besides. If you tell them that I am in love, and sometimes so incandescently happy that I don’t know what to do with myself none of them will believe you.” 

“A common school-teacher.” Christophe laughs. “Somehow I always thought you’d find yourself a bigger place in history.”

“So did I,” Victor admits, with a shrug. Yuuri will take that place, now, Victor is sure of it: they will write of him as wise, and kind, and generous. He is a writer himself; he knows how the words will go:  _ A reformer, this Emperor.  _ Yuuri has already told him that someday he will move the capital to Edo, that he has spoken to his father about implementing some of his ideas now, even as a young man. …  _ honorable to the end, though the Empress never bore him a son.  _

He will, of course, probably disappear from the narrative. “... That reminds me, actually.” Victor reaches back for his bag, a leather pouch that has accompanied him for thousands of miles. Inside are his notes, the books and drawings and journals of a journey that ends here. “These are for you, if they’re of any use.”

“You spent countless amounts of time on this work,” Christophe notes, trying to push the knapsack back into Victor’s hands. “It’s too big of a gift.”

“You misunderstand me entirely,” Victor notes, standing up with a smile and a hum. It is late; he wants to return to Yuuri’s quarters. “I will spend the rest of my life in your debt. The gift is too small.”

 

**\- - -**

 

“Father is releasing your house arrest,” Yuuri whispers later, curled into Victor’s arms. His breath warms Victor’s collarbone, tickles; his toes brush Victor’s calves.

“Oh? What did you say to him?”

“Actually, it’s something he said to me,” Yuuri admits. “He told me that the wisest thing his grandfather ever told him was that where an Emperor sets his gaze is one of the most important choices an Emperor makes. Sometimes because of what he looks at. And sometimes because of what he does not look at.” 

It’s a clever piece of language, Victor thinks; tacit acknowledgment of the situation and still somehow subtly backhanded in the way he’s come to expect of the court dealings here. He considers it and comes to realize he likes Toshiya more. “What about you,” he muses. “What will you look at?”

Yuuri stirs, and leans up, capturing Victor’s mouth in a lengthy, languid kiss. “I am always looking at you,” he whispers against Victor’s lips. “Even when it seems I am not.”

Victor understands him perfectly. Love, he realizes, doesn’t use its eyes.

 

**\- - -**

  
**Journal of Explorer & Scholar Victor Nikiforov, on loan from the Giacometti Museum, Lugano. ** **  
** **Katsuki era.** **_Treasures from the Silk Road._ ** **_  
_ ** **13 May - 19 May 2018. Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo, Japan.**


End file.
